


These foolish things

by middlemarch



Category: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Friendship/Love, Gift Giving, Humor, Jilted, Post-Finale, Romance, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-14
Updated: 2017-06-14
Packaged: 2018-11-13 21:38:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11193957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: The first text was not from Paula but from Hector's mom.





	These foolish things

Greg wasn’t sorry when he heard. That Rebecca’s wedding to Josh, such that it was, had been an utter fiasco, a debacle, a wedding in name only with a groom who had gone to a monastery (there was monastery close to West Covina! Closer than the beach!) rather than stand up beside Rebecca in her white lace and yards of chiffon direct from New York, in a dress that could have been brought in by the Santa Ana winds given the outcome, instead of being warehoused in a part of Brooklyn immune to gentrification, overlooking Sheepshead Bay, before her mother had it Fedexed to California. Rebecca a bride, beautiful, lovely until her eyes went sort of blank, maniacal in a way that Paula always liked and Greg hadn’t ever.

Okay, he was a little sorry. Sorry for the shock Rebecca would have had and for Father Brah, cleaning up yet another mess, for Valencia who’d question her skill as a wedding planner, even though the moment he’d read the text, Greg had known she was born for it. He worried about what Hector meant when he texted “it was wild man! She was right on the edge” given that WhiJosh had texted “she nearly went over, those cliffs, Darryl had nightmares” and when Heather wrote an actual email, the equivalent of the Magna Carta in import, detailing without one emoji or acronym Greg had to Google just exactly how Rebecca had been jilted and how weird she had been afterward.

Greg had translated out of West Covinese. Rebecca hadn’t been weird, she’d been heart-broken and bereft, brought back to somewhere close to minus 12 million in the self-esteem category, sure it was her own fault, that she was unlovable. Greg still loved her, so he knew it, just as he still remembered exactly how her face had looked in the even, celestially pure light of the airport, looking up at him, ready to kiss him when he proposed a hotel. Her eyes, those blue eyes that she made up too much, he could see everything even if no one else could and he’d wanted to stay, for her, but he knew it would destroy him. Not her, she was a fucking phoenix, or he’d thought she was, would be, but now he realized there were injuries she could not heal from. Damage that could not be undone, not even in a scar, lightning on her forehead or invisible until she started humming. Chris mentioned something about her boss, a classically handsome WASP with a private plane, making Greg wonder to himself in an aside about Chris’s upbringing (again, who let their kid hang out in a sports bar?), but Plymouth or Plimpton didn’t sound like he could manage Rebecca when she was at her lowest, when she stopped crying and lost her mind except that she was still the smartest damn person in every room, any room and a thousand times more dangerous because of it.

The marriage would have been a disaster of Chernobyl or Chicxulub proportions. Greg imagined T. rexes falling and breathing heavily, gasping piteously from their Sears Tower sized lungs, in the wake of Rebecca’s satin train, the gleam of a wedding ring and the Garfinkel ring splitting the chartreuse radioactive shimmer of the imagined nuclear meltdown that probably reflected too many viewings of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH when he was young and impressionable. Rebecca loved the idea of Josh and she would have dismantled him, limb from limb, each atom of poke-fed flesh, as she tried to discover whether the man could ever match the ideal; the entire valley would have trembled in her wake. It wasn’t that Greg thought he would have been the better bridegroom; they still were out of sync, even if they loved each other, which he still did and, he could not help hoping, she still did. There was so much between them and so many barriers and she’d understood, which was why she hadn’t run up the escalator after him and pushed his wheeled luggage out of the way. She had let him go when he went and he’d appreciated it, that she loved him enough, was in love enough, to listen to him. 

There was no text he could send her. He couldn’t write “Rebecca, it wasn’t you” because that was not a text and it wasn’t entirely true. He couldn’t send her a gif or an emoji; there was no joke or quip he could make that would not add salt to the wound. He picked up the phone to leave a voicemail, but he was afraid he would make a promise, “I love you, I’ll come back, flight 92, it comes in at 7pm PST, meet me” and that he would keep it and he could not write a letter because she had written one to Josh and kept it for 20 years, in a personalized box and her purse, under her pillow. A letter was too big a risk.

He sent her tea, overly expensive tea flavored with blueberry and verbena, only 12 sachets it said on the tins, and he just wrote in the text box “from Greg.” He found a scarf that had the entire text of _The Fall of the House of Usher_ on it and he found her a CD of Usher’s greatest hits and sent them both, even though he had to pay shipping. He sent the Zingerman’s bereavement basket and added on the rugelach and the cinnamon rolls and had them address it to “Rivka Hadassah.” The customer service girl Ada was very patient as he went back and forth about whether to sign it “your goyim, Greg,” agreeing the your might be a strain. He sent her every Dorothy Sayers’s novel with Harriet Vane, because his study buddy Ruth, who went by “Bader Ginsburg” no joke, recommended them, and made sure to say Rebecca should start _Gaudy Night_ first, domina. Greg didn’t like mysteries and he wasn’t much of an Anglophile, but he thought there was never a more perfect title for Rebecca that than, domina, and he wished he’d been able to whisper it into her ear when she slept beside him, after he’d fucked her into a gentle oblivion. Domina…

He sent Heather National and International Velvet and asked her to watch them with Rebecca. He borrowed a boom box and spent hours scouring music stores for cassettes so he could make her a mix-tape with a lot of Cindy Lauper and The Indigo Girls and sent it to Paula; it was labeled “Bunch of Roses” and he’d paid his roommate’s sister Prisha to decoupage pink roses into the case. He texted Darryl and WhiJosh and asked them to keep an eye out, noting that Darryl was Rebecca’s best male friend. It might even have been true.

And he sent a small bear in an Emory tee-shirt, not the cheapest one you could buy from the university store but not the biggest one, with the political economy paper he’d aced, knowing that even though she was 87% of the way to clinically insane, she’d understand what he meant, how he loved her well enough to not come, that he trusted she could come back and that there might be a time when they could finish each other’s sentences, but it wasn’t now. It would never have been the right time with Josh, there would never have been an open door for them to walk through and she would never had made it as Becks Chan, trying to explain kugel in Tagalog to her mother-in-law. Rebecca, domina, _baby_ he'd called her when he came with his face against her neck, never anyone but herself Dr. Akopian would have said and smiled approvingly to see him show he knew it. Greg didn’t identify much with Peter Wimsey, more taken with Bunter, but he liked how distance had been affection, withdrawal the closest caress. He’d sent enough; she didn’t post a Beyoncé inspired vlog or find the best Yelp-reviewed singing telegram in Atlanta to let him know, she’d just texted, **thank you G xoxo** and it had struck him, like the taste of her on his lips, her hand soft on the back of his neck, the siren when the cop had pulled him over, blue, blue like her eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> I just felt so bad for Rebecca after that episode and I've been missing Greg although Nathaniel is interesting. He may be in Atlanta at the Harvard of the South, but I couldn't imagine Greg wasn't told about the wedding-that-wasn't. There are references to Dorothy Sayers Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane pairing and dinosaurs and 80s-90s pop culture. Domina is Latin for "mistress" in the "you my lady, you're in charge" kind of way, not the other.
> 
> The title is from the song "These Foolish Things" by Maschwitz and Strachey. There are a number of gorgeous recordings. I'm partial to Ella Fitzgerald's. The lyrics are divine.


End file.
